Information-seeking dialogues: Some of their logical properties

Abstract

The dialogical games introduced in Jaakko Hintikka, “Information-Seeking Dialogues: A Model,” (Erkenntnis, vol. 14, 1979) are studied here to answer the question as to what the “natural logic” or the logic of natural language is. In a natural language certain epistemic elements are not explicitly indicated, but they determine which inference rules are valid. By means of dialogical games, the question is answered: all classical first-order rules have to be modified in the same way in which some of them are modified in the transition to intuitionistic logic. (Furthermore, in some cases quantificational rules have to be modified further.) The rules that are left unmodified by intuitionists are applicable only to the output of certain game rules, but not to others. In. this sense, neither classical nor yet intuitionistic logic is the logic of natural language. We need a new type of nonclassical logic, justified by our information-seeking dialogues.